Birthday Apr 23
https://youtu.be/GubJVThmZs4
Bohemian rhapsodies
Article Info
Italian opera season
The English National Opera presents eight Italian operas. The season finishes on Saturday, Dec 16, 2000.
To
celebrate 400 years of opera, the English National Opera is offering
Italian works from the 17th-20th centuries. The inclusion of the lesser
known La Bohème by Ruggiero Leoncavallo, an opera rarely
performed outside Italy, may be one of the jewels of this season.
Leoncavallo, famous for his only successful opera I Pagliacci, was a friend and collaborator and subsequently a rival of Giacomo Puccini, who wrote the more well known La Bohème.
La Bohème
started life as a series of short stories written during 1845–49 for a
Paris magazine by Frenchman Henry Mürger (1822–61). Mürger then
collaborated with Théodore Barrière, a popular dramatist, in 1849 to
write La vie de bohème, a play about artistically sympathetic
students who live in poverty in a Left Bank attic, are acquainted with
good natured “loose” women, and are destined to die from consumption or
alcoholism. This play was a huge success and as a result Mürger revised
his Corsaire tales to create the book Scènes de la vie de bohème
(1851). Mürger himself had been a typical such bohemian, but proceeded
from poverty to social acceptance and prosperity. But the damage done to
his health during his student days was to kill him at the age of 39.
Leoncavallo and Puccini had known each other a long time before composing their versions of La Bohème.
In 1884 Puccini entered a competition for one-act operas. He did not
win, but Edoardo Sonzogno, the Milan impresario and music publisher who
had instituted the prize, was the main rival to Puccini's publisher
Giulio Ricordi. In 1889 both composers worked for Ricordi, who had
commissioned from Leoncavallo (a dramatist/librettist and composer) both
an opera and the libretto for Puccini's Manon Lescaut.
However, the two composers fell out when the libretto was not to
Puccini's satisfaction, and it was with the rival publisher, Sonzogno,
that Leoncavallo achieved his greatest success, I Pagliacci (1892).
Composers who wrote operas on the same subjects as Puccini
Leoncavallo
saw Mürger's play in Paris and recognised its operatic possibilities,
beginning work on it in 1892. Ricordi, Puccini, and Leoncavallo were
still on friendly terms. At the same time Puccini was seeking
inspiration for a follow-up to his Manon, and Ricordi tried to secure the publishing rights for a La Bohème;
however the piece was already in the public domain. Ideas were guarded
secrets because so many operas were copied by others; for example,
Puccini's operas have versions by other composers (see panel). In March,
1893, the two adversaries met in a Milan cafe and Puccini told
Leoncavallo of his work on Mürger's book. Leoncavallo rounded on him,
saying that as he had shown Puccini his libretto the previous winter he
had first call. The dispute then spilled over into the Milan newspapers.
On March 20 II Secolo announced that Leoncavallo had been working on his opera La Bohème. The following day the rival II Corriere della Sera
carried a similar story, and Puccini then wrote to that newspaper to
claim that if Leoncavallo had told him about his project months earlier
he, Puccini, would not have thought of Mürger's Bohème.
Leoncavallo's reply reasserted his claim to priority and Ricordi used
this discord successfully to encourage Puccini to work harder and finish
first, which he did. Although both operas opened within months of each
other in 1896/97 Leoncavallo could not sustain his initial success
despite a revival in 1913 with a new title, Mimi Pinson, and a change to voice parts at higher registers.
Verismo
or realism was the new style of opera writing at that time. Leoncavallo
wrote with an eye on the dramatic realities in the stories, and this
was to prove to be a problem for audiences who were used to much lighter
treatment of serious subjects. La Bohème has no plot; it is
just a series of tableaux on the Bohemian life of friendship, love,
wine, poverty, and death. Leoncavallo made Marcello and Musette the main
characters and included more incidents and much darker features, such
as Marcello attempting to strangle Musette. Rodolfo and Mimi, whose main
scene is Mimi's death, are barely seen before act IV while Puccini
makes Mimi his focus throughout and uses her death as a big emotional
climax with which to end his opera. He also uses humour to counteract
the unfolding tragedy.
Musically, Puccini's Boheme shows a more mature musical identity than is found in his Manon Lescaut;
Leoncavallo's opera lacks homogeneous musical identity and is a
patchwork of styles. But if you are in London, do try to catch
Leoncavallo's La Boheme I Pagliacci and Puccini's La Boheme may not seem the same after that.